A long time ago, in another life, Shaw was my favorite author. I felt an affinity with his wit and especially his evident scorn for everything and everyone around him. I read as many of his texts as I could find--provided they were in the matching Penguin edition with which I started. My anal retentive library tastes were evident even then. When I was young.
But now I am old--shut up--and hadn't read anything by Shaw for five years at least. Blessed with much backstage time during the run of Princess Ida (a smashing success, if you're interested), I decided to revisit my old friend and exercise some of my age-ripened reading skills. Like many things from that period of my life--marriage, for one--I found that I no longer have a taste for it. At least, not in the same way.
There is still plenty to recommend Shaw. Certain of his characters are just as indelible as Shakespeare's, if slightly more interchangeable. I'm thinking of The Captain in Androcles and Robert in Saint Joan, who might well be the same character, though I didn't mind because that character is so cool. The Captain's line "Are your Christian fairy stories any truer than our stories about Jupiter and Diana, in which, I may tell you, I believe no more than the Emperor does, or any educated man in Rome," and her response "A man cannot die for a story and a dream . . . If it were anything small enough to know, it would be too small to die for." express perfectly and touchingly Shaw's view of religious experience, and that scene is the one truly cosmic moment in either play. "There lives more faith in honest doubt," as Tennyson said, "believe me, than in half the creeds."
Sadly, Shaw does not touch this height as often as I had thought. The plays are too often didactic and as such lack layers of meaning, a criterion by which I judge all literature. I don't grieve my old regard for him, but I have been semi-consciously searching for Shaw's replacement ever since.
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